SmogRank / History / Country race
Countries, worst air first, day by day
Each country's typical measured city over the 30 days to every day since January 2023, worst first. Press Play to watch the order change, or drag the slider to any day.
The worst countries for PM2.5 over the 30 days to 11 Oct 2025: Pakistan 59.6 µg/m³, Peru 31.6 µg/m³ and India 25.3 µg/m³.
- 1Pakistan11 cities59.6
- 2Peru5 cities31.6
- 3India218 cities25.3
- 4Chile45 cities22.5
- 5Philippines3 cities19.1
- 6Ghana4 cities17.9
- 7Serbia35 cities12.8
- 8Bosnia and Herzegovina5 cities11.4
- 9Taiwan45 cities11.2
- 10Mexico48 cities10.8
- 11Thailand75 cities10.4
- 12Poland72 cities9.7
- 13Brazil3 cities8.7
- 14Hungary8 cities8.7
- 15Italy12 cities8.7
- 16Hong Kong13 cities8.1
- 17South Korea141 cities8.1
- 18Latvia4 cities8.1
- 19Spain106 cities7.9
- 20Romania11 cities7.9
+ 26 more countries, 7.4 µg/m³ and below
- 30United States875 cities6.7
Not counted on this day, too few cities measured: Luxembourg since 10 Oct 2025, Austria since 8 Oct 2025, Greece since 8 Oct 2025 and Czechia since 18 Sep 2025.
Countries counted each day
A country's number is its typical measured city: the median of its cities' means over the 30 days (a city needs 21 of them measured; 5 of 7 on the 7-day race), shown only with 3 such cities. A country whose monitors go quiet fades out where it stood rather than sliding down, so a gap never reads as cleaner air; "was" beside a city count marks a month after many cities joined or left. Some large countries are thin or missing because their monitors' licences don't allow reuse. How we rank.
Not covered: the government monitoring networks of China and Turkey, which publish only on their own websites; we are building the readers for them. Most cities there are missing from this board, not clean. Why.